


Condensed Pages

by chaya



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, capslock abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-13
Updated: 2012-08-13
Packaged: 2017-11-12 02:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaya/pseuds/chaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dib's super-secret journals chronicle the transition from blind alien-hating rage to something even weirder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Condensed Pages

Dib's journals, while painfully thorough, could be hashed out something like this:  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 739004-739059** : A new kid is in our class and I hate him hate him hate him he is an alien and nobody else can tell he is GREEN, BRIGHT GREEN, HE HAS NO EARS, HE CALLS HIMSELF A WORM BABY, I HATE HIM SO MUCH I HATE HIM I HATE HIM WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN SEE THIS.  
  
THIS IS JUST LIKE WHEN I TOLD THEM ALL ABOUT THE ZOMBIE TROUT IN THE LAKE BUT THEY ALL LAUGHED AND THEN OLD KID'S UNCLE'S ROOMMATE GOT HIS NOSE BITTEN OFF BY ONE, AND IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE, AND IF I HADN'T DRAINED THAT LAKE WE'D ALL BE ZOMBIE TROUT BY NOW, OR AT LEAST ZOMBIES, OR AT LEAST NOBODY COULD HAVE GONE FISHING THERE ANYMORE.  
  
Gaz keeps eating all the waffles before I can get 'em.  
  
 **Condensed Pages 749045-749186:** A MUFFIN? HONESTLY? A MUFFIN? ALL THAT OVER A MUFFIN? MY ENTIRE (FAKE) LIFE THROWN IN FRONT OF MY EYES BY A HUGE GIGANTIC ROOM IN HIS BASE TO LURE ME INTO A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY, ALL "Oh, and by the way Dib, who's saved the Earth like a million times at this point, and has all the girls, and everyone loves you, did you throw that muffin at Zim?"  
  
WHY DID HE DO THAT? WHY DID HE JUST MUFFIN ME BACK? AFTER ALL THAT?  
  
I HATE ZIM I HATE ZIM I HATE ZIM I HATE ZIM I HATE HIM I HATE HIM I_  
  
\--and the journals continue as such until about page 1447821.  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1447821-1447849** : He interrupted my sleep with some plug-in doom machine. Was dreaming about churros. Really love churros. Zim is stupid._  
  
Another turning point is a little over a year on, somewhere around page 1460855.  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1460855-1460962** : Zim lost his Woot Cruisey whatever. It's been parked outside the Churro Shack for like a week now. (Churros are so great.) GIR left it there. Should probably tell Zim. Won't. Too funny to see him look for it under napkins in the cafeteria.  
  
He's not really a threat anymore, is he.  
  
Should still keep spying. Just to be sure. He might accidentally doom us, you know, by accident._  
  
By seventh grade Dib had given up any delusions that Zim was ever going to rule anything, but had become so used to spending his afternoons in the bushes with the binoculars that he just went along with it anyway.  
  
Dib would watch GIR watch The Scary Monkey Show, or whatever else was on (or wasn't - Dib was pretty used to the robot, but watching the little guy stare at a blank screen for hours and _laughing insanely at irregular intervals_ never got any less disturbing), and if Zim tried to make something explode, well, Dib would just have to step in the way, just in case. The radioactive baby gophers could have done some damage if they'd gotten loose. They wouldn't have doomed the world, but they could've bitten a little kid or something. You know. Better to nip that in the bud.  
  
Zim was apparently not supposed to get taller, but he'd started to. Still incredibly shorter than the other kids, "stunted growth", but  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1493820-1493826** : Is it all the processed food he's eating? Growth hormones and stuff? He looks thrown by it. Maybe he should see a doctor or somethi Maybe I should take a look at him. It'd be kinda sad, watching him fall over and die because of triptophane or something weird like that._  
  
And Dib did go over to Zim's later that week, disabling the gnomes and waving to GIR -- on the roof, throwing cupcakes at the squirrels, giggling kinda horribly -- and Dib just knocked on Zim's door as if this was done all the time.  
  
"Welcome home, son."  
  
"I'm not Zim."  
  
"Would you like CORN NUTS, little boy?"  
  
Dib sighed and pulled his EMP ray out again. "Sorry, guys." The robo-parents squirmed and fizzled at first, but once they died down he stepped over their tutued remains and wandered into the living room. "Hey, Zim?"  
  
Zim wasn't there, really, and while Dib knew he could try to bypass the toilet or the trashcan or the endtable or something, it just wasn't in him.  
  
Dib made himself comfortable on the couch and watched tv. GIR continued on the roof, and the occasional squirrel would rocket, cupcaked, through a windowpane.  
  
"I'm not cleaning that up," he said to nobody in particular.  
  
Mysterious Mysteries reruns were on, and it was the Chickenfoot episodes back to back of all things, and so Dib continued watching for the funnyweird feeling of seeing himself on television showing a poor, stupid man for what he truly was.  
  
Zim did eventually unearth himself in a fuzzy moose costume.  
  
"INTRUDER! FILTHY HUMAN INTRUDER IN MY BASE! COMPUTER, GET-"  
  
"Computer, it's cool."  
  
" _\--WHAT?_ "  
  
"It's fine, computer, I'm just here to talk to him."  
  
" _WELL... THAT'S FINE, I GUESS._ "  
  
"COMPUTER, HOW DARE YOU IGNORE ME TO LISTEN TO THIS SMELLY.. SMELL... SMELL-BEAST FULL OF... BEASTY... SMELLS?"  
  
"You're just kind of tall, Zim."  
  
"EH?"  
  
"Tall. You've gotten taller."  
  
"EH?"  
  
"It's just three inches or something, I don't know, but all your clothing fits funny and you seem like you're weirded out by it."  
  
Zim glared, but at this point Dib was a head taller, which really gives one perspective in these situations.  
  
"It might be the cafeteria food. Or the stuff GIR brings home... I've been thinking it might be you're finally reacting to the growth hormones in everything, since you haven't been eating them since birth like us and building up a tolera-"  
  
"EH?"  
  
Dib pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm worried you might be sick."  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1500063-1500105** : ...and he just sort of stared at me and stared at me and I sort of felt like the computer was staring at me too, and it took me a while to realize what I'd said, and I felt really weird and sick for a second and then I just walked straight home and laid down and fell asleep, and now I'm awake again, and now that I've written it down I'm going to go have some toast and maybe watch tv and try to never do that again._  
  
There was the time Zim was going to get crushed perfectly by a gigantic robo-demon the size of two Skools, Dib could see it happening in his mind's eye, the eight-eyed thing rolling perfectly over Zim's already unconscious body, and Dib reached out and grabbed Zim by a boot and yanked him out of the way, too hard, slamming him into a nearby car by accident, but that didn't matter in comparison.  
  
And there was also the time Dib really did finally get Zim incarcerated for being an alien, and trapped in an upright bubbily tube for seemingly the rest of his days, but it wasn't 48 hours later that Dib was huddled up in a corner of a bathroom stall with a panic attack for god knows what reason, rocking, until he sent an anonymous tip to a bizarre humanitarian organization that he was supposed to hate because he was with the Swollen Eyeball, and they didn't bust Zim out so much as explode half the compound and accidentally crack Zim's glass in the process so he could wriggle out and think it was all him.  
  
There was also, perhaps most jarring, the time Dib ripped Zim's backpack off and suddenly discovered that Zim kind of needed that to live, and hastily slapped it back on and dashed before Zim got his breath back and asked why he would _do_ that,  
  
but Dib didn't write about those times in his journal. In fact, he tried not to think about them.  
  
Ever.  
  
All that made it into the journal was,  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1500243-1500245** : Discovered today that dad made me as an experiment. My life sucks in the name of science.  
  
Great._  
  
Finding his true origins gave Dib somewhat of a nihilistic view on his present and future, and so his only conscious efforts from then on were to, in order,  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1500249-1500250** :  
1) Care less about... stuff.  
2) Don't get hung up about everything going wrong, which I guess goes with 1.  
3) Try some eyeliner, maybe? Would that look okay with glasses?  
4) Figure out what Gaz's story is. I'm made of horrible misfortune. Is she made of hate?_  
  
And because of 1 (and 2) Dib made a conscious effort not to subconsciously repress this weird stuff that he definitely hadn't ever been repressing, no, and so when summer ended and twelfth grade was starting, and Zim looked completely different but exactly the same, Dib came to terms with some pretty heavy stuff.  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1500482-1500483** : Zim is definitely at least 5'6". It's kind of creepy.  
  
I'm still taller._  
  
(The bigger revelations came later with more embarrassment than Dib really would have liked.)  
  
"So, uh, new clothes." Dib plunked his tray down next to Zim's untouched one and began chewing on what was probably once corn on something resembling a cob. "Same old design, though? Why?"  
  
"FOOL!" Zim's aggravated squint was really just sort of endearing at this point. "What better to wear than the traditional Irken garb? Like I would sink so low as to wear filthy human clothes!"  
  
"I dunno, t-shirts look pretty great." Dib poked mildly at some peas.  
  
Zim muttered something about head/body ratios and crossed his arms.  
  
"You do too."  
  
Zim eyed him sidelong. "I... do..." Watching him struggle with this was nearly as painful as it must have been for him. "...tee... shirt?"  
  
"...no, Zim, you don't do t-shirt." Dib shook his head and looked down at his spoon. "Forget it."  
  
"ZIM FORGETS NOTHING! EXPLAIN YOUR ENCODED STATEMENTS OR FEEL MY WRATH!"  
  
"Zim, get off the table, forget it."  
  
Zim did not get off the table. Zim kicked corn into Dib's face, which Dib found sort of rude.  
  
"Quit it. QUIT IT. Forget the whole t-shirt stuff, whatever, forget it, I hate you."  
  
The lack of feeling in the statement was lost. "THE HATE IS MUTUAL, EARTH-SCUM, AND BURNS LIKE THE POWER OF A THOUSAND SCHLOOKAN SUNS! SUFFER! SUFFER WITH THE BURNING!"  
  
"Jeez, Zim, I just said you looked good."  
  
And it was at this point that every last smidgen of white noise that the cafeteria was normally so happy to provide _vanished_ as if it had never existed at all.  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1500539-1500592** : And it's not my fault for noticing that Zim's gone kind of native, even if he's yelling the same and wearing the same kind of stuff, because he's gotten really teenager-human-shaped even if he does look emaciated because GIR feeds him waffles made out of soap, and even when he's in disguise his eyes are kinda cool, you know, purple, and it's incredibly funny every time it rains now, because he knows Gaz will kill him if he gets within a three foot radius and so he hides under my trench coat instead and looks like somesort of flower girl holding up a train except he's whimpering at the same time, and it's not fair for everyone to just stare at me in the cafeteria like I'M the freak._  
  
Dib's careful apathy/nihilism was battered and torn. Skool was his undoing.  
  
Dib could not wait for college.  
  
"Dib-human, you look more disgusting than usual. What can the MIGHTY IRKEN RACE thank for such a boon?"  
  
"I've just got a lot on my mind."  
  
"Ah, the Dib-worm is worried over what sk-OOL he will continue to? A true dilemma. I personally hope you end up in a college made entirely of mud."  
  
"I don't think there are any mud colleges, Zim."  
  
There were two, in fact, but that's irrelevant - what Dib was focused on was the Institute for the Sooper Brilliant, ISB, the most challenging place possible. Assuming you could afford tuition - Dib thanked his father for that - the acceptance percent was somewhere under half a tenth of a percent. Kids had gotten by calculating exactly how terrible their odds were of getting into ISB.  
  
Dib had dreams about ISB.  
  
"Well, I hope they build one specifically for you. Here, have an ice cream cone."  
  
"No thanks, it's probably drugged with some pork virus."  
  
"Wh- LIES! THE DIB-CREATURE SPOUTS FILTHY LIES!"  
  
"See you later, Zim."  
  
"SUCH FILTHY, HORRIBLE LIES HE SPOUTS!"  
  
Dib's essay to ISB was indisputibly outstanding. It took him months to flesh out entirely, but he ended up with a fully-constructed theory encompassing nearly every unexplained phenomenon that had occurred throughout his entire life up to this point. What happened after the Wettening, why did almost nobody remember it? Why was he bologna one day and undelicious the next? Where did Mini-Moose go?  
  
The essay was 394 pages, eight point font. No margins.  
  
 _ **Condensed Pages 1510913-1510919** : It's going to be so great. I've got pictures of the place tacked up all around my room, you know, just to prepare myself for so much awesomeness all in one building. Squeeeeeee! I am squeeeing right now just thinking about it. (Gaz just came in and smacked me for being loud. I will squee quieter.)_  
  
Three months after submitting his essay and forms, signed in triplicate, it was raining. The mail came and delivered Dib a letter labeled 'RUSH, SERIOUSLY, HURRY, GO GO GO GET IT THERE RIGHT NOW'.  
  
Dib read the letter and walked to Zim's house.  
  
"Eh? You? What do you want with the mighty Zim?"  
  
Dib wiped the droplets off his glasses and said,  
  
"Kill them all for me, okay?"  
  
Dib's letter had read as such:  
  
 _Mr. Dib Membrane-  
  
Congratulations, young sir!_  
  
"What madness are you speaking, Dib-monkey? Do you mock Zim?"  
  
"I'm not here to mock anyone."  
  
 _According to your test scores, you are incredibly smart._  
  
"Then what is this... this craziness? Since when have you taken the side of the Mighty Irken Empire?"  
  
 _Unfortunately, your essay was really super long, and we got bored._  
  
"I've seen the light. You've been right all along."  
  
 _Someone else had an essay covered in SCENTED STICKERS. Genius, no? We love scented stickers!_  
  
"Eh? Right?"  
  
"The human race deserves to be wiped out."  
  
 _Especially chocolate bubblegum scented._  
  
"This is nonsense! TRICKS! LIES! Dib sees no reason! You come to my home with-"  
  
"I'm serious, Zim, I'll even help you, I don't care anymore, I'm sick of it."  
  
 _Mmm, chocolate bubblegum._  
  
"The Dib is ill? This expl-"  
  
"'The Dib' is sick of trying and trying and getting absolutely nothing but the occasional bruising or singeing or bitten ear for all his efforts, for not being recognized as at least _kind_ of right about _anything_."  
  
 _We gave that kid your slot with full scholarship._  
  
"And so you deign to join forces with ME? ZIM?"  
  
 _Sorry!_  
  
"Yeah, I do."  
  
 _XOXO,  
  
-ISB_  
  
"What makes you think you would be of any use to-"  
  
 _PS: Your picture scared us. Why is your head so big?_  
  
"I'm of plenty use. I've saved your life a few times, and I stop your plans almost every time, so that means I know where all the holes are in your plans."  
  
"My plans have no HOLES, human!"  
  
"Whatever. Can I join up?"  
  
GIR's voice shrieked from somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen, "HE CAN HELP US MAKE BISCUIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTS."  
  
"GIR, WE SHALL NEVER MAKE BISCUITS OR EVEN SPEAK OF BISCUITS, IS THAT CLE- hey! Hey! Dib-human! What're you doing! Get out!"  
  
"I'm gonna go make sure he doesn't put dish detergent in the mix. Are you helping or not?"

**Author's Note:**

> JV once mentioned that there had been an episode slated that would reveal that Dib was grown in a lab as an experiment in suffering, or something to that effect. I consider that canon.


End file.
